Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 93, Mario Tennis and No. 92, Kirby's Dream Course
Tennis, but make it role-playing. And golf, but with umbrellas and balls that turn to stone and warp tiles and
I’m ranking the top-101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
Mario Tennis is, generally, a perfectly cromulent series of video games. Camelot Software Planning is more revered for their RPGs — the Shining Force series of strategy RPGs on Sega consoles was their creation, as was the Golden Sun duology and spinoff/sequel for the Game Boy Advance and DS — but at this point they’ve spent far more years and time on sports titles like Mario Tennis.
Congrats to all of us for being old now.
And Camelot does a good job of it all, which is why they’re still making sports games featuring Mario and Friends 20 years after their original entry in the field, Mario Golf: their latest such release was the 2018 Nintendo Switch title Mario Tennis: Aces. For me, though, the high point of this series came near the beginning, because it managed to combine the two things Camelot is very good at into one game: arcade sports and role-playing.
Image credit: Nintendo UK
Mario Tennis for Game Boy Color is a different Mario Tennis game than any of the others, besides its direct sequel, the Game Boy Advance’s Power Tour.* The typical Mario Tennis setup you’re familiar with if you’ve ever played one of these games is here, of course: you play as Mario and Luigi and Peach and hey some of the enemies and rivals from the Mario universe, too, and that all works perfectly fine, as it always does. The real appeal of this specific title from 2001, though, is in the story mode, where you aren’t a member of the extended Mario universe with a tennis racket in hand, but are instead a student at a tennis academy, learning the ropes of this particular brand of arcade tennis while moving up through the class to become the number one player on campus.
*Power Tour didn’t make it to this list over the GBC version, in part because it is a lot uglier to look at thanks to the choice of using pre-rendered characters in matches rather than the more aesthetically pleasing 2D sprites already in the game. And, to a lesser extent, the late-game introduction of Power Shots, which are often just an annoyance in what is otherwise a skill-based arcade experience. It’s still great, though, don’t get me wrong, there’s just no need for both of them to appear on this list, so the original handheld Mario Tennis it is.
Through a series of tutorials-as-challenges and competitive matches, you gain experience points which improve your spin, backhand, movement of the ball, movement of your player, and the like, which in turn make you into a more complete, dominant tennis player. And you’ll need to be one, in order to compete at the highest level of play at the academy, and not just as a singles tennis player, either. You also have to manage the experience points and growth of your doubles partner, or else you’re going to have a difficult time moving up that ladder as well. It doesn’t pay to just throw all of the experience points into your own bucket and become an unstoppable singles star if you can’t win a doubles match and progress through that part of the story as well.
This is the Mario Tennis I keep coming back to. I enjoyed Aces until I realized I wasn’t going to be spending time online playing multiplayer regularly enough, and for the non-online Mario Tennis games, the same would happen when I realized I had spent all the time I planned to with the single-player portion of the experience. This handheld version of the now-longstanding series, though, continues to hold up and draw my attention, because the RPG-styled campaign inherently rewards you going back to learn the ins and outs of the title every now and again, by leading you through the same steps it did all those years ago when it first released. It gives you much more focus, and more joy, than “I think I want to play a few tennis matches with cartoon characters in higher definition this time” can, because there’s more depth to the experience here. More meat to the game itself.
Other Mario Tennis games have tried to employ some kind of campaign mode, but none is as successful, to me, as this straight-up tennis RPG that Camelot developed nearly 20 years ago: even Power Tour’s campaign mode is the same thing, just with a little more mystery in the story. There is real challenge here, even if you’re an experienced Mario Tennis veteran, or even if you’ve completed this particular Mario Tennis story mode in the past. It starts off simple enough, but the difficulty ratchets up, and it all concludes with you having to take down the top tennis player around, Mario, after entering a tennis tournament. You’re going to play a lot of matches and learn a whole lot of techniques before you get to that point, though, and you’re going to need all the experience you’ve gained in order to best and then become the top player, too.
We could really stand more sports RPGs in our lives. Golf Story, a Switch title from 2017, is an excellent entry into the field, as was MLB Power Pros, which was a fantastic arcade baseball title in its own right, but the addition of a story mode where you were a student and amateur baseball player attempting to succeed in school while balancing that with a social life and attempt to go pro made it all the more memorable. Inazuma Eleven is the most successful venture in this field, to the point it not only has sold millions and millions of copies, but the soccer RPG also has spawned spinoff games, a manga series, and both television shows and movies.
The genre also goes much further back in time than Mario Tennis. World Court Tennis was a sports RPG on the Turbografx-16 where you traveled the countryside “fighting” random encounters in order to power yourself up enough to defeat the “Evil Tennis King.” Mario Tennis is further proof that this kind of concept works, and whether we get more classic sports RPG titles in the future or not, at least we’ve got games like this one to return to.
And if you’ve got a 3DS, you don’t even need to start searching ebay for a copy of Mario Tennis, either: it’s available on the Nintendo Shop for $5.99.
Kirby’s Dream Course
We’ve already discussed in these rankings how HAL Laboratory’s use of Kirby as a way to experiment with different modes of gameplay can result in some wonderful titles. Back in the early days of the franchise, Kirby was the mascot for a number of games that could have happened without him, but were better for the inclusion of the little pink puffball and the world he inhabited.
This was the era of Kirby’s Avalanche, which was just Super Nintendo Puyo Puyo, but with Kirby — the cousin to the Sega Genesis Puyo Puyo exclusive, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean. Kirby Star Stacker was a Game Boy (and Super Famicon) attempt at a match-three game, and while there was and is no shortage of match three games, Star Stacker is legit. There was also Kirby’s Pinball Land on the Game Boy, which, well, you know what kind of game that was. Kirby’s Block Ball was another Game Boy entry, this time using Atari arcade classic Breakout’s gameplay as a foundation, but expanding it well beyond those realms by adding all kinds of Kirby-based elements — including Kirby himself as the ball breaking the bricks — as well as boss fights, multiple paddles, and traps on the various walls that all had to be avoided.
And then, there was the best of this bunch of experimentation: the 1995 SNES title, Kirby’s Dream Course. It’s a mini golf game, where Kirby was both the golf ball and the replacement for the putter, as he self-propelled after you made the same kind of determination for distance, direction, and where on the ball you’d like to strike as you would in other golf games. You know how much fun mini golf is, or how fun golf video games can be: now imagine that, only with Kirby.
Image credit: Nintendo UK
There is more to it than just “point Kirby in a direction and choose how hard he’s going to roll,” which is the reason why this game works, and works well. You get a choice of where the hole actually is in each stage, because it’s your actions and strategy that make that determination. As Kirby The Golf Ball, you have to defeat a number of enemies before the actual hole appears: the final enemy on each stage is the one that will transform into the hole, and allow you to clear it and move on to the next. So, you not only need to account for traps, angles, enemies you don’t defeat but that shoot lightning at you like Kracko does, and which direction is likely to make you roll right off of the course and spend an extra life, but also, which enemy you least want to attempt to reach in order to defeat it, and would instead prefer that it turn into the hole.
Maybe there is a floating enemy, positioned in a place that will be difficult to reach while airborne. So, you instead choose to roll up on the other three enemies on the stage, which will cause the floating enemy to transform into a hole on the ground. Now you don’t need to worry about hitting Kirby just right in the air so that he strikes this enemy and also lands somewhere you won’t immediately regret. Choose instead to force the issue, and you might get a lot better at making accurate jumps because of all of the practice you’ll receive, but at what cost to your score in the present?
There are also conveyor belts, warp tiles, tiles that will send you in the direction they’re pointing, and powers. Yes, even Kirby’s version of mini golf includes copying enemy powers and using them. Defeat a Waddle Doo with a parasol, and you now have the ability to deploy that parasol to slow yourself on the ground, or to help you float down from the air — right into the stage’s hole, if your accuracy is good enough. You can also turn into a stone, get the High Jump ability, and more. You can use those powers once per shot, and you won’t lose them until you pick up a new power or lose a life.
Speaking of extra lives: you have four tomatoes as a life meter, and each shot you take uses up a tomato. You gain additional tomatoes by defeating enemies or getting Kirby into the hole, and an entire extra life should you manage a hole in one. And you’ll need to rack up holes in one if you want to succeed at this title in the long run. This video below shows the powers available, as well as someone who knows how to use them in order to get those precious holes in one: it, uh, takes some practice to get to the point where you can just do that.
Par for each stage seems nearly impossible as you’re just learning the ropes. You might feel good about how the eight-hole course you’re playing is going, until you realize you’re two-thirds finished and already worse than the course’s par. It’s not that Kirby’s Dream Course is impossibly difficult or has extremely high standards: it’s more that you need to learn to optimize your play on each individual hole.
There is also a two-player mode, should you want to compete against something other than just the computer’s high scores or yourself. Don’t be rude, though, if your couch opponent doesn’t know how to play: show them the ropes, like you wish someone had showed you when you were just learning that this is more difficult than your average Kirby title.
Kirby’s Dream Course is pretty readily available these days for a 25-year-old game, as you can get it as one of the titles on the SNES Classic, or you can play it on the Switch for free if you’re subscribed to Nintendo’s online service. If you’ve never played before, you really should. And if you’ve already played before, then you’ve probably already revisited it, because it’s not like anything else just like it has released since.
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